


Gorgoneia

by Whisperslip



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:07:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whisperslip/pseuds/Whisperslip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So, I had originally starting writing a several page fairy-tale mashup, but in my perpetual shuttling back and forth between computers, I had neglected to actually SAVE the file to either of my machines. Naturally, this made it karmically necessary for my jump drive to become irretrievably corrupted thirty six hours before the deadline. So I ended up with this, rushed and not at all what either of us had in mind, for which I apologize. : (</p><p>That said, I derived the idea from an article I had been reading, in which the author noted that major religions often expanded their influence by absorbing regional deities. I was intrigued by the image of gods orphaned by the destruction of the communities they had once represented--either by change or by war--looking desperately for homes inside newer stories. I also sincerely hope you don't mind that I chose to write about some of the lesser-known females of the Greek mythos. I have been intrigued by the gorgons ever since college, where there were portrayed as examples of frightening and/or threatening aspects of feminine power--generally isolated or destroyed, but occasionally revered--and thought that a story in which they were involved would at least tangentially invoke your desire for strong women.</p><p>Merry Christmas, reader! I wish you the happiest of holiday seasons with friends and family, and hope that my efforts have added unto your joy in some small measure.</p></blockquote>





	Gorgoneia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [calenlily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/calenlily/gifts).



_She has long since ceased to mark the passage of the years, but she does not need to see time being partitioned into its manifold boxes—minutes, and hours, and days—to know that it has been a long, long time since she has last seen her sister._

 _She cannot blame her._

 _Even for Euryale, the halls still echo with the memory of Medusa’s laughter, and Stheno, well, Stheno is different now. She talks too quickly, like a mortal, and her eyes are brittle and over-bright. Even when she is home, she no longer bothers to change out of the clothing she has acquired among the humans—legs sheathed in denim, tight-fitting shirts that chatter with images and words—and she paces constantly, nervously before she finally catches herself, lighting a cigarette with a short, self-deprecating laugh._

 _Sorry, she always says, it’s just so different there, you know? The way time moves in the mortal realms, rushing forward, always forward, like a river that sweeps everything before it and it just feels so stifling, so suffocating sometimes, this place where the hours do nothing but sleep and collect into pools._

 _I know, says Euryale. And she_ does _know. She knows how heavy eternity can feel if you don’t allow yourself to open your mouth and drown._

 _* * * *_

We were goddesses once.

The Hellenes would have liked to forget it, perhaps, but they were young gods then. They were still insecure, bloodthirsty, and querulous, eager to eradicate the vestiges of Stories to which they did not belong. I think that they must have feared what we represented, resented the reminder that they too might one day be forgotten, their temples abandoned, derelict and old. How could they have helped it? It is the nature of the divine, after all, to yearn for the infinite, to expand itself from one eternity to the next. How can a god help but be tormented by the memory of its own genesis? What can it do to protect itself from the impulse to erase its own beginnings, to forget that it had been the worship of mortals that had drawn it from the darkness, given it a name and face and a place to drink?

So when we first knelt in supplication to Olympus, begging for the scraps of belief we needed to survive, they gave us place in the stone halls of the utter west but they also made us _monsters_.

I still remember how my sister wept when the birds she had once loved plummeted from the sky, their feathers a perfect study in marble as they shattered mercilessly upon the earth. She who had once been Medusa the Beloved, beautiful Mèduse, Hope in War and Laughter in Battle, would never have anyone gaze upon her again, already disfigured by the fear of the men who were spreading her new stories. We held her for long nights in the darkness, Stheno and I, as she screamed and beat her wings and scored the stone with her talons of brass. We wondered then if it was really worth it, this existence living on crumbs of worship from other gods.

But we had been goddesses of justice and war—proud, existing to die in battle— and we were not strong enough to endure the craven deaths of the truly forgotten. (Thin and starving in the darkness, pared down to a rumor.)

The fear of men is bitter and tastes of ash.  It has nothing of the savor of devotion.

But it suffices.

 _* * * *_

 _Sthenno wears boots and tight denim, her angular face dwarfed by a pair of tinted glasses. Her bandana lies discarded in her lap. The serpents hiss and nip sleepily at her fingers as she gently strokes their heads, watching her sister pensively through a sheet of amber glass. She feels awkward, vaguely guilty. She is aware that she should have visited, oh, thirty, forty years ago and that it is only her cowardice that has kept her away, but she doesn’t really know how to apologize and Euryale wouldn’t have wanted to hear it anyhow._

 _It was just that….nothing ever changed here. The stone halls of the utter west continued to echo with the sounds of water, and the corridors that lead to Dis (cold, echoing with ghostly voices) smelled perpetually of incese and ash, scarred by the sacrifices that Euryale still burned in memory of the people for which they had once been gods. Every year, there were new gouges in the walls on the anniversary of their sister’s death, evidence of Euryale’s seven nights of ritual grief._

 _Euryale hadn’t even altered her appearance in ages—scaled and serpentine, draped in white linen, stubbornly maintaining the aura of horror  that suited a monster of old. Even Sthenno still had a hard time looking her directly in the face, turned aside by the sight of naked truths too terrible to bear._

 _For her part, Sthenno had figured out long ago how it would be with these new generations of mortals— these men who crawled, dreaming, into their machines and let the humming soothe away the old thirst for horror and salvation. The influence of the Hellenes had endured far longer then they would have expected, but the old myths had lost their ability to awe and terrify. They could survive still on the pale residue of belief that remained, and though they could not change their essential natures, they could put on new forms and faces. They could **leave.**_

 _But Euryale would never leave._

 _Her second sister would remain here forever—mourning their lost sibling, honoring a people for whom not even a memory remained—nothing but a shadow and a rumor that haunted the nightmares of men._

 _Even now, her sister is whetting her blade of silver and stone, the corpse of some variety of seabird splayed on the table beside her. She will flay its body, lay out its innards in whorls and patterns like widow’s lace, burn it upon a pyre of rosemary and young wood and murmur prayers in a language that is no longer even spoken in dreams.  
_

 _“You don’t have to do this,” Sthenno blurts, suddenly, desperately. “You can stop. You can leave.”_

 _Euryale does not lift her eyes from the blade. “No,” she says in a quiet voice, “I can’t.”_

 _*  *  *  *_

It happens like this:

They are the three sisters of violence, and their dominion is war. They subjugate the gods of the lands around them, and eat the flesh of those that remain. Their monuments rise implacably above the fertile deltas of the southern oceans, and they stand—proud and terrible—back to back in their temples, faces carved into dread aspects of stone and ivory and jade.

Sthenno rides before their armies, and Medusa rides behind. Medusa sings to their soldiers of triumph and reminds them sweetly of their families, while Stheno, dread Stheno, is shrill and fierce as the wind, brandishing a scythe in each of her many arms. And above them, grim Euryale, passing judgment with rod and brazen wings, sternly admonishing men that there is virtue that the gods expect even in the heat of war.

Perhaps they grow complacent, fat with plunder and slaves, or maybe it happens too gradually for them to notice—but the day comes when all of their sacrifices taste of blood and they realize, sick with horror, that the meat upon their altars has been carved from the flesh of their own children, when slaves begin to run scarce during war.

‘Our noble people have become as demons,’ Euryale cries unto sisters, ‘And they make us into beasts, thinking of nothing but murder and intrigue and bottomless hunger.’

(And it came to pass that fair Mèdu spilled out her immortal blood unto the keeper of the dismal gates, and was granted passage unto the bowels of the earth. In the darkness, she thrust her spear into the flesh of the world-snake until the writhing of its agony had covered her once-beloved cities from before her face and buried them in the sea.)

It is a lie of the Olympians that it could only have been the foul ugliness of the gorgon that made its gaze as fatal as stone—for even as monsters, they were beautiful. No, beloved, it was the unendurable grief in their eyes, the intolerable despair. For what man can hope to behold the anguish of a goddess and flesh remain?

*  *  *  *

 _“Do you know?” Stheno says, unexpectedly, her voice cold and curiously detached.  “I never told you. Athene let me see her once. They had affixed her head to some sort of damned shield, but I placed a few drops of my blood on her tongue and woke her. Old magic. But perrhaps I shouldn’t have. Maybe it hurt her. I don’t even know what I hoped to do.”_

 _“Stheno **.”** The way Euryale says her name, Stheno knows she wants her to stop, but she can’t now, she can’t, ever again.  
_

 _“I talked to her for a while,” she continued, helplessly. “I asked her where she was now, what there was after this. I was scared. Had she gone back to the primordial darkness? To Dis? To the shadow valleys of our brother-gods, perhaps? Maybe even after our divinity had died, our hell would still remain.”_

 _“Stop it, Stheno! Stop it.” Covering her ears and cringing like a frightened child, Euryale, grim Euryale, who always, always did what she was supposed to do long after it had ceased to matter._

 _“She said there was no place for gods,” Stheno whispers, “She said that it was cold.”_

 _*  *  *  *_

There’s a woman sitting on the end stool when you turn around, though you hadn’t heard anyone come in, and you bring her a menu and a complimentary bowl of peanuts and ask her if there was anything she would like to start her off. She asks for a dark lager, please, and a napkin. Her voice is polite but she doesn’t seem particularly willing to chat, which is a shame but you know how it is. You can respect that.

She sits there through the black hours, drinking steadily, her hat pulled down over her eyes. There’s an aura of inscrutable mystery about her, somehow, and you find yourself setting down glasses with care, afraid to to disturb the air of stillness and solemn gravitas. She's a strange duck, but you keep them coming with quiet efficiency and ten minutes before closing, she carefully counts out the bills and precise number of coins, thanks you, and leaves.

There’s an unusual coin among the change when you finally get around to picking it up—a small, crude disc, probably copper. You can't really make out the details, but it seems to be embossed with the face of a woman, hair twining wildly around the sallow cheeks like ivy, like snakes. She’d probably mistaken it for a dime or a penny, but it's that’s not much. You won't sweat it. You take a fancy to it, slip it into your pocket or purse. Joke to yourself that it can be your good luck charm.

Nothing much really happened, now that you think about it, but sometimes you still find yourself thinking about her. During in-between moments, maybe, or just as you're falling asleep. You wonder where she came from. You wonder what she knows.

 

-End-

**Author's Note:**

> So, I had originally starting writing a several page fairy-tale mashup, but in my perpetual shuttling back and forth between computers, I had neglected to actually SAVE the file to either of my machines. Naturally, this made it karmically necessary for my jump drive to become irretrievably corrupted thirty six hours before the deadline. So I ended up with this, rushed and not at all what either of us had in mind, for which I apologize. : (
> 
> That said, I derived the idea from an article I had been reading, in which the author noted that major religions often expanded their influence by absorbing regional deities. I was intrigued by the image of gods orphaned by the destruction of the communities they had once represented--either by change or by war--looking desperately for homes inside newer stories. I also sincerely hope you don't mind that I chose to write about some of the lesser-known females of the Greek mythos. I have been intrigued by the gorgons ever since college, where there were portrayed as examples of frightening and/or threatening aspects of feminine power--generally isolated or destroyed, but occasionally revered--and thought that a story in which they were involved would at least tangentially invoke your desire for strong women.
> 
> Merry Christmas, reader! I wish you the happiest of holiday seasons with friends and family, and hope that my efforts have added unto your joy in some small measure.


End file.
